Understanding Media, the extension of Man - McLuhan & McFantastic Four

Key Question: To what extent do you agree with McLuhan's view of technology effect on human life and human's lack of effect on technology?

The first point is "merely to say" that a medium's impact on a person or a culture is the result of the scale and speed of its distribution. As we had seen before, the content of a medium is always tied to another medium. The distinction McLuhan makes is to say that a medium's effect is proper to the medium itself, and dependant on the culture in which it exists, and less related to the medium's contents or its applications. Speed of delivery and quantity delivered have more effect on society than the contents of messages. Like Mitchell, he talks of the importance of the "instant sensory awareness of the whole" ("firstness") to support his point of medium being more affective than content.

McLuhan tends to depict the arrival of new technologies romantically, like his image of the bedouin on his camel listening to the radio. At times it seems like McLuhan wants to say that technology descends from the heavens, like in the monkey scene from 2001, a Space Odyssey. I feel like that's closer to a biblical reference than it is to reality. Bedouins ride camels because building and maintaining roads in a desert is difficult and expensive. Nowadays they use cellphones.

Hot and Cold

Like his message about "medium over content", his concept of hot and cold media was well explained but I found that the connections he made at times seemed arbitrary.

Hot means lots of information is given by the medium and consequently not much involvement is asked of the human that interacts with or consumes it.
Cold means not much information is given by a medium thus the human brain needs to work to fill gaps of information.

That part is fine; but we found it difficult to handle the broadness of the statement, for not only communications media are hot and cold, but so are cultures, technologies, detective writing, Calvin Coolidge, the Cold War, etc. Movies can be both hot and cold apparently. So can print writing. Hot and cold media can either bring society closer to a tribal state or take it further away from it.

He does make an interesting point about the exhaustion of senses faced with an overload of media, supporting his initial point that personal change is caused by quantity and speed of delivery of media rather than its message. He adds that this exhaustion sets the stage for another media (opposed in hotness) to become more dominant. The internet may be that medium as it potentially the coldest.